Mischa climbed the side of First Hill, and watched the activity below and around Stone Palace. When the lights dimmed, the new doorway remained open. This Mischa did not understand: fearlessness or even contempt seemed an insufficient reason for the new people to leave themselves so vulnerable. Her suspicion was aroused.
She waited until the traffic into the new entrance ceased, until it seemed that those who were returning to bed had done so, and those staying out had settled into their pleasures. Then she climbed down to the Circle and crossed the trampled, littered black sand. The beggars watched her, and she thought she heard them whisper and titter when she stopped in front of Stone Palace.
Slowly, they grew silent. When Mischa stepped over the threshold, no one outside or in spoke to her.
The tapestries and the velvet had disappeared. The corridor was lined with flat panels of light brown plastic that reflected no echoes. The lines were clean and sharp and the corners right-angled. The air smelled curiously flat; the tang of stone was gone. The carpeting had been replaced with a cushiony tile.
The hallway projected a long way back, without branches or adjoining rooms. Mischa felt uneasy in a space so regular and devoid of hiding places. She reached a foyer in which, if a fountain of water had existed, it had been replaced by one of light. Self-luminous panels regularized the chamber's shape into a polygon with alternate empty faces of hall entrances. The tapestries began again in all the halls but the middle one. Mischa moved toward it. The faint air currents of her passing disturbed the fountain. Its fibers shivered, and their hue changed slowly from red to soft blue.
The aberrant hallway was square and straight, and built to appear longer than it really was. The ceiling crept down, the walls in, the floors up. The perspective was exaggerated, yet the huge double doors Mischa approached were almost three times her height.
And still she saw no guards. She touched the left-hand door, and it swung silently, easily ajar. By every criterion of suspicion Mischa had ever used, she should turn and flee this place. She moved one step closer, so she could see inside the room beyond the doorway, and she expected an outcry, an alarm, the touch of a captor's hand. She could feel the scars on her back; she could always feel them on some level of awareness, and she knew she always would.
She hesitated with her hand on the door. If she went away now, she would be safe for a little while, but the inevitable results would be the same as if the pseudosibs drove her away. Her sister's insanity would affect her until she was as helpless and pliable as the little girl. As well be dead, and Chris would die, for nothing in Center could ever help him.
Mischa slipped inside.
Cold and cubic and mechanized, the room beyond was so completely different from anything else in Center that Mischa needed a few seconds to orient herself. She began to recognize pieces of furniture, decorations, electronic equipment. The furniture looked uncomfortable, the decorations unartistic, the equipment incomprehensible. From deeper inside the suite a kind of frighteningly frigid passion crept out. It rose to a peak, like an almost inaudibly high noise at the threshold of pain. It fell off abruptly. It was still present, still alien, but less intense.
The next chamber was a bedroom. In the bed a companion sat half up, back to Mischa, trying to caress the pseudosib lying beside her. He stared at the ceiling, not responding. She whispered something and stroked his smooth chest, stroked her hand down his cheek, and twined her fingers in his long black hair. He slapped her, roughly, and turned over, hunching his heavy shoulders.
The young woman stared at him, touching her face in disbelief. She flung away the bedclothes, reaching for her dress, and stood wriggling into the tight openwork knit. Mischa knew her slightly: the companion was recently turned to the business, highly paid, well respected, with every right to expect better treatment. Other classes hired themselves out for beatings.
The companion saw Mischa, and did not recognize her. 'Who the hell are you?' Anger and frustration burst out. She glared for half a second, whipped around, and dragged the rest of the blankets off the pseudosib. He sat up, finally roused. His eyes were bloodshot. 'I told you—' He broke off when he saw Mischa.
The companion threw the blankets on the floor. 'There he is,' she said to Mischa. 'He's all yours.' She left the room, taut with fury.
The pseudosib glared at Mischa without speaking. She did not know which brother he was, and she did not like the feel of him; her wish to leave increased, but it was still less strong than her reasons for coming.
He swung his legs over the bed and stood up. He was massive, two meters tall or more, and half that, it seemed, across the shoulders. His smooth tan hairless skin was so perfect, so glossy, that Mischa almost expected his nude body to be as mechanical and sexless as the strange sculptures hulking in the corner.
'Now,' he said. 'Who are you?'
The blank white wall-screen lit up with the image of the second brother. Mischa looked from one to the other. She had never seen them before, and their similarities were quite singular, but the man in the screen seemed more serious, less dissipated. The room behind him was the same, but he had one tiny, faint line between his eyebrows, while the forehead of the pseudosib beside her was completely smooth. 'Go plug yourself into a computer,' he said to the image. When he spoke, the flesh beneath his jaw seemed very slightly loose: the beginnings of fat over tight muscles.
The image looked Mischa over. 'She's rather young for your tastes, isn't she?'
Mischa said nothing, though she was tempted to mention that the companion who had left was almost the same age as she. The two brothers together were more than twice as unpleasant as one alone.
She noticed the small camera tracking where the image gazed. She felt acutely uncomfortable in its range. It swiveled away when the image looked back at his brother.
'She's uninvited.' His cheeks were flushed and his voice defensive. 'What happened to the alarms?'
'I was curious about her,' the image said.
'You watched her come in? You let her come in?'
'You have your own alarms. If you choose to leave them disengaged,
that isn't my worry.'
'She might have killed me!'
'Don't be ridiculous. I scanned her. I'd hardly allow her to come so far if she were armed. What can she do?'
'She can get out of here.'
Very deliberately, Mischa hitched her hip up on the low storage cabinet behind her. She refused to reveal how shaken she was to learn she had been watched all the way in without her knowledge, though she had looked for scanning devices. Still, they had not detected the crystal knife, or they had discounted it as useless.
'Are you deaf, or stupid? I said get out.'
'Just a moment,' said the image. 'What do you want?'
'I want to go offworld,' Mischa said.
'That's very interesting,' the image said. 'Come over here. We'll talk.'
'Wait a minute,' his brother said with instant covetousness. 'She came here first.' He looked at Mischa as though he had not even glanced at her before. 'You're a funny kid. Stay here. I'll find something for you to do.'
Mischa said something untranslatable in an offworld language, the choicer parts of which Chris knew and had taught her. It expressed her opinion of funny kids and funny kid jobs in two main words, a handful of prefixes, and one very emphatic suffix.
'Get out of here!' His voice and emotions crept up into rage. He glared at the image in the screen. 'I hope she takes a scalpel to you, you walking tissue culture.'
Mischa entered quarters that were a mirror image of the first except in color: the neutral hues were tinged with blue rather than red. The second pseudosib met her at the door and waved her to a couch; she sat on it cross- legged and he sat across from her, appraising her.
'Which one are you?' she asked abruptly.
He raised an eyebrow and smiled slightly. 'I am Subtwo. And you?'
'My name's Mischa.'
'What can you do?'
'Anything,' she said. 'Show me once.'
He nodded mildly. 'Have you had any schooling?'
